Review on HighPoint Rocket 640L Lite - 4-Port PCI-E 2.0 x4 SATA 6Gb/s RAID Controller by John Stefko

This HighPoint Rocket 640L just works - no problem with my system when I see it in the PCI-e X16 slot and double the speed get that I have on board SATA2. I highly recommend this controller if you are using it with a Samsung 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD512 512 gig SSD. I can't comment on other SSD compatibility, but I suspect it will work with many, if not all. You also get 4 ports instead of 2 ports. For reference, see the review I wrote for the Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 Sata3 controller just below, which only has 2 ports and causes continuous boot loops when a Samsung 512 Gig SSD is plugged into it. I am including reviews of other products to help consumers who want to upgrade their system with a Samsung SSD to save time and headaches. Apricom Velocity X2 Review: Bought this controller (Apricorn Velocity X2) to work with Samsung. Pro Series MZ-7PD512 (512GB) SSD, direct from Apricorn due to a delay in shipping when purchased through Revain. My 5 year old motherboard could see the SSD and I was able to connect the SSD directly to SATA2 on the MB and do a clean install of Win7 64bit - no problem. When I installed the Apricorn controller in my system in a PCI-e X16 slot, my system would not boot and went through continuous boot cycles. I bought a HighPoint Rocket 640L, plugged it into the same slot, plugged in an SSD and wasn't worried. My speed doubled as measured by CrystalMark. I also plugged in my old hard drives (there are 3 of them) and they were also slightly faster than leaving them in the MB Sata2 slots. I called Apricorn, spoke to tech support on March 28th, 2013 and they admitted that they had just discovered that the Samsung SSD and the new Corsair weren't working with their controller and that they didn't have a fix for that yet had problems. Your solution is elegant. in terms of not requiring any mounting hardware and cables, but it just doesn't work with all SSDs. You should contact Apricorn Technical Support to ensure it will work with your SSD prior to purchase. But the HighPoint 640L has 4 ports instead of 2, comes with 4 cables, and costs $30 less at $69 here at Revain. My system immediately recognized the HighPoint, there were no boot problems and the speed doubled compared to Sata2 - it's not difficult. For reference, I upgraded from Win XP 32-bit with 3GB RAM to Win 7 64-bit with 24GB RAM and added an SSD. My boot time went from over 4 minutes to just under 1 minute and my shutdown time went from 1 minute to 7 seconds. All my apps just blink on the screen. Load times are now completely negligible. As of this writing I have 139 processes running and 172 programs installed (7 of which are running) and my system is still booting up quickly and loading apps and data like screen glare. FireFox 19 used to take 30 seconds to load. This is my slowest program at 3 seconds because I leave a dozen to 20 tabs open from my previous sessions, which consumes huge computer resources. I can't recommend enough to go for this type of upgrade. I've been in the computer business since 1981 and I finally have a near-perfect, high-speed system. Good luck with your new installation.